Benjamin Mitchell – Using Kanban to Get Knowledge and Continuously Improve

Just Added:

Benjamin Mitchell will speak about “Using Kanban to Get Knowledge and Continuously Improve“.

“Get knowledge” was Deming’s admonition to managers. Kanban boards in Software Development help visualise and generate large amounts of data. This data can be used to study and understand the Software Development process and opportunities for continuous improvement.

This talk will draw on examples from Benjamin’s experience running a web-based derivatives trading system for BNP Paribas which has delivered nearly 50 fortnightly production releases in two years. Tools such as a Kanban board, cumulative flow diagrams and statistical control charts were essential in highlighting problems with the process and for checking that changes implemented actually lead to improvements.

A key part of this talk will be explaining the concepts of Common Cause and Special Cause variation and how they should be handled in general. These ideas can be useful in Software Development if they are applied to appropriate processes.

As Scholtes has said “Without data, opinion prevails. Where opinion prevails, whoever has power is king”. Benjamin will talk about how the data generated from a Kanban system in Software Development has challenged management thinking about the nature of the work.

Benjamin Mitchell is currently working as a Project Manager with BNP Paribas a web-based trading platform using a Lean and Kanban.
He is passionate about working with software development teams to frequently delivering business value to production. He has spent the last two years studying Deming, Ohno and Seddon in order to better understand how to improve Software Development processes.
He’s currently in a state of “Flow” as a result of finding ways of combining his university degrees in psychology and statistics and his experience of 12 years of software development to his day job.

Christophe Louvion – Through the Lean Looking Glass, and what we found there

Just Added:

Christophe Louvion will be speaking on “Through the Lean Looking Glass, and what we found there“.

What do you do when as the new CTO you realize, in the dawn of the biggest financial crisis since the depression, that implementing scrum in a chaotic environment gives you a lot more working software and accolades, and not enough business value? Run away? Ignore and pretend? Think and act different?

This is the story of the passage of a mid-size company in the crazy world of online media through unexpected transformations; a tale where scrum gives place to kanban, teams are rethought, roles are redefined, and where lean principles grow and sprawl out all over. Within a year, during which the advertising industry collapsed, signs of higher maturity speak for themselves: true self organization, accelerating pace of change, and stronger financial performance.

Christophe Louvion has over 10 years of experience in enabling rapid business growth through building high performance teams and cutting edge operations.

Christophe is the CTO at Gorilla Nation, a leading online advertising firm based in Los Angeles. He is an advisor to startups in the educational, ecommerce and entertainment industries, and an active member of the Lean-Agile leadership community.

He pioneered shopping search engines as the VP of Engineering at Shopzilla, the largest shopping search engine in the world.

Christophe has a Masters in Math & Computer Science from ESIAL (France), is a Certified Scrum Coach and won an Anvar award from The French Agency for Innovation.

His personal blog can be accessed at RunningAgile.com

David Joyce – A Journey to Systemic Improvement

Just added:

David Joyce will be speaking about “A Journey to Systemic Improvement“.

Part one of this talk revolves around a series of experience reports following the introduction of Kanban in mid 2008.

After Kanban principles were applied in a single product team, Kanban “flu” spread to teams doing legacy application support, fixed delivery projects, product development, creative design, a commercial off the shelf (COTS) implementation and SAP within BBC Worldwide.

The experience reports will show empirical evidence that teams using Kanban have achieved high levels of maturity and have done so within time frames hitherto unreported.

It will show how Kanban sets an expectation of flow, provides improved predictability and business agility, and enables a kaizen culture (continuous improvement driven from the shop floor) via bottleneck management, waste reduction and variability reduction, thus enabling teams to visualise and implement improvements.

Part two of this talk centres on Systems Thinking.

Kanban encourages a whole “system” view rather than a locally optimised IT view, it changes the underlying paradigm from project-centric, to flow and value-stream centric.

Within agile circles there is focus on delivering “value” or “valuable working software” or “delivering quality code” but what if we are just doing the wrong thing righter?

Decisions about the use of IT should only be taken from a position of knowing the “what and why” of current performance as a system.

Traditional IT leaves “knowledge of the work” to a mixture of business analysts, Product Owners, proxy customers and managers views. The traditional approach of IT implementation is “push” – here is the new IT system, now how do we get people to use it.

In the Systems Thinking approach IT is “pulled”, the people doing the work understand the “what and why” and “pull” IT applications into parts of the work knowing what to expect.

This second part of the talk will summarise Systems Thinking, how it can be of benefit, and how Kanban has led to it being applied within BBC Worldwide.

David is an agile development manager and coach with 12 years technical team management and coaching experience, and 20 years software development experience.

In recent years, using Scrum and XP, David has coached onshore and offshore development teams and successfully launched an internet video startup from inception to launch. David currently works for BBC Worldwide as a Development Manager, coaching teams on Lean, Kanban and Systems Thinking. David is a certified Scrum Master, Lean practitioner and Kanban coach.